A New Golden Age for Nintendo?

Don’t worry Nintendo fans, the sky isn’t falling. Quite the contrary… the sky is looking beautiful… and it has gorgeous moving clouds that project shadows onto Hyrule Field in the new Zelda Wii U game premiered at E3 yesterday.

*purrrrrr*

For Nintendo fans the last year has been tough. Flat sales, a lack of software, and two new consoles that absolutely annihilated the Wii U at retail. So what changed yesterday?

It appears that Nintendo stopped caring about all of that.

They probably won’t BE number one for a generation or two, or ever again. They will NOT win-over third party developers, and yes, they are probably a firm number 3 this generation. And that’s OK. Because they are Nintendo, and they are thinking outside of the box, and they BROUGHT it yesterday at E3. Here’s why…

Make your own Super Mario Bros. levels in either classic 8-bit or “New” Super Mario themes. Go as crazy or as simple as you like. Share your levels on the MiiVerse and become a Mario Design Master. Available on Wii U in 2015.

OK. So The Legend of Zelda on Wii U. We have all had our expectations for a “next-gen” Zelda but this my friends… is… awesome. An open-world “Skyrim-esque” Zelda with gorgeous HD cel shaded graphics. I don’t own a Wii U, I admit, but this makes me want one. Go anywhere in Hyrule. Finally.

Finally… That nerdy little Toad gets his own game. Is it a platformer? A puzzle game? An exploration/adventure game? Yep, yep, yep. This thing looks awesome. Available on the Wii U, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker brings Toad to the small screen in gorgeous M.C. Escher style levels. This looks fun.

So Nintendo has created a completely non-violent shooter game. Kudos. Splatoon puts you in control of people who turn into squids. Your job? Color the level with your teams color ink. Turn into a person to spray ink, turn into a squid to swim through ink quick… but only YOUR ink… your opponents colored ink will slow you down. So much potential here. Think Quake meets De Blob. Awesome.

It’s Yoshi in yarn. You can unravel the levels like a sweater to uncover secrets. Just watch the video. Assuming this game has an ounce of difficulty it looks pretty fun.

There is a lot more there, feel free to check out their Digital Event, but these are my favorites. I could go on and on about Shigeru Miyamoto’s new Wii U GamePad games, but you can see for yourself in the video… With the pressure of #1 behind them, Nintendo is ready to rock. My body is ready.

4 Responses

They showed quite a bit this year, but I’m not sure it was a slam dunk.

Smash Bros is going to sell like crazy. So will the Pokemon stuff. But Mario Party isn’t going to move consoles, nor will Captain Toad, Splatoon, Hyrule Warriors, and probably not code-name STEAM. Mario Maker may not move consoles either, nor Yoshi’s Wooly World.

I enjoy Nintendo, and I would buy some of the games revealed, for sure… I love Kirby, but why did they have to do a sequel to a DS entry? I don’t want to stare at my gamepad the entire time. I want to play on the big screen (and by default, you kind of have to look at the gamepad to draw Kirby’s rainbow ramps). Yoshi’s Wooly World will be a blast, as well. Captain Toad would be great ONLY as a digital game for like, $20.

But that’s the problem with a lot of Nintendo’s stuff – It makes Nintendo fans happy as hell, but the rest of the gaming community just kinda goes ‘meh’ all over again. I’m seeing that sort of divide on message boards this year, too. A lot of ‘Nintendo won’ and ‘I’m only interested in Zelda’.

And man oh man, Zelda. Zelda will move units, but how much? Skyward Sword didn’t sell quite as many copies as Nintendo would have hoped, and the Wii had a really large install base at the time.

Star Fox… cool, but again, will it actually move consoles? On top of that, I really don’t want to have that big gamepad up in the air and move it around… it could get uncomfortable pretty quick.

Nintendo’s E3, I think, was great for Nintendo fans… not so much for everyone else.

Btw, pumped for Bayonetta 2, especially now that I see they’re including the original.

That’s what’s great to me though. It was great for Nintendo fans and I think that’s who they are creating this stuff for. There was no obligatory Assasins Creed, or Call of Duty. It was Nintendo being comfortable being Nintendo. I don’t think they will be #1 and I don’t care.

Earlier this year they offered to buy stock back up, made some salary changes, and basically ‘fell on their sword’. Mario Golf now has DLC and I guess other games will have DLC in the future, they’re trying their hand at doing a tad more advertising, they’re pushing to make the gamepad seem viable instead of a gimmick, etc. These are all changes that have occurred as a result of their lackluster first year+ of the Wii-U. More changes are coming, too. They’ve already talked about wanting to stop ‘doing their own thing’ and go down the path of making an operating system that’s standard across every platform, such as the IOS on iphones and ipads.

Nintendo is not going to settle for what’s been going on. They’re changing things up… and the Amiibo’s are a part of that too. They said earlier this year they felt their failure was that they didn’t make the Wii-U appealing enough to children… because if children cared enough to run to their parents and pester them enough until a Wii-U was purchased, they’d be in a much better spot.

We all know that’s not what their problem is. Their problem is… well, them.

Hardware that’s more difficult to optimize for because it’s not too similar to the other lead platforms, gimmicky controllers that devs don’t want to waste their time developing for since they make no money from Wii-U sales, etc. Nintendo have lost third party, and that’s their problem. Not ‘appealing to children’.

First party games may drive someone to pick up one console over the other, but third party games are still the highest selling titles year after year.

Yeah. My point was I think with being #1 off the table and being in survival mode has made them more creative and nimble. Third party games are the bread and butter of the business yet Nintendo didn’t feature a single Third Party multi-platform game in their presentation. Not one.

Of course they want to be #1. Who wouldn’t? But I think they are finding comfort in being a creative video game and hardware developer who can make buttloads of cash despite not selling 100 million units again like they did with Wii. Hell Wii was a runaway success that didn’t set the world on fire with it’s games. I’d rather have a niche system that gives me something the other two can’t.

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